For Chicago, the Game Within the Games

The Los Angeles region absorbed a major set of games without a shudder. Traffic moved. People could drive to their favorite restaurants for dim sum, bulgogi or pad Thai. The major evidence of the Summer Olympics was the hanging of pastel banners from lampposts all over Southern California.

On a steamy Sunday morning, Aug. 5, 1984, Joan Benoit won the first Olympic women’s marathon, and then there were Flo Hyman, Carl Lewis, Jeff Blatnick and Nawal el-Moutawakel of Morocco. Great names. Great memories.

The 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles pretty much saved the Olympic movement and established the United States as the nation that knew how to make money from major sports events.

But now the Los Angeles model for international events is mostly honored in the breach, as witnessed by the empty buildings in Beijing, which was the host a year ago.

The United States is struggling to get back in the host business for the 2016 Games, as Chicago tries to weather current machinations by the United States Olympic Committee and hold off three other great cities — Madrid, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro — in voting that will take place Oct. 2.

“I live in the present and the future,” Ueberroth said the other day as he came down out of a no-connectivity zone in the Idaho hills to talk on the phone about 2016 as well as 1984.

Ueberroth, about to turn 72, still speaks with gratitude about China’s defying the boycott by the Soviet bloc, which gave immense gravitas to the Games. He permitted himself a rare backward glance, to the time when the Olympics seemed like a wounded mammoth, lumbering toward the La Brea Tar Pits of history.

The Moscow Summer Games in 1980 had been blighted by Jimmy Carter’s ill-advised boycott over the Afghanistan invasion; the Soviet boycott was inevitable in 1984. Cities were wising up, rejecting the cost and the intrigue that the Games entailed. Ueberroth recalled how Los Angeles got the 1984 Summer Games almost by default, and how he tried to talk major American cities into holding satellite soccer matches, only to be rejected.

Yet Ueberroth, a self-made man from the travel business, had a plan. The first step was selling television rights, which the host city could do in those days, and running the Games on the interest. Ueberroth recalled that he had two goals: “put on great games for the athletes and fill the stadiums,” both of which he did. And with the cold war still a reality, he put in just enough security without turning Los Angeles into an armed camp.

Photo

Joan Benoit won the first womens Olympic marathon at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.Credit
Tony Duffy/Allsport

Those Games became unforgettable, with the Rose Bowl packed for a Brazil-France soccer final and Dodger Stadium bustling for baseball games. And the committee turned a profit of $232.5 million to the organization now called LA84 Foundation, which says it has invested $185 million in sports programs serving two million local young people.

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Ever since, host cities have talked about the Los Angeles model. “Everybody knows you shouldn’t build,” said Ueberroth, who added, “But cities get caught up in the competition.” Recent hosts like Sydney, Athens and Beijing, tended to go a little nutty, building giant halls for obscure sports.

Beijing erected the Bird’s Nest, the now-vacant Olympic stadium squeezing meaningless yuan from Chinese tourists with a mix of patriotism and nostalgia. Bluntly, 2008 is so over. London is walking the line for 2012. And then there is 2016, to be decided in two months in Copenhagen.

Chicago at one point seemed like the front-runner for 2016, but that was before the United States committee announced a national Olympic cable network that has mightily ticked off the International Olympic Committee. The U.S.O.C. also forced Jim Scherr to resign as the chief executive and installed Stephanie Streeter, a former Stanford basketball player, as the temporary replacement. Streeter, who comes from the corporate world, is not well known to the clubby membership of the I.O.C.

Given the anonymous facade of the U.S.O.C., Chicago must bank on its obvious strengths: local leadership and money, a great setting and a plan that pays homage to the familiar Los Angeles model. The worldwide popularity of President Obama doesn’t hurt, either.

Ueberroth says the United States committee will do fine with the international emissaries remaining on its staff. He has been known to be right: as the baseball commissioner after 1984, he kept saying the owners were dysfunctional and could not stand up to the union. But he pushed for an impractical New York bid for 2012 that did not succeed.

The I.O.C. will come to appreciate domestic Olympic cable networks, Ueberroth said, noting that potential corporate sponsors are no longer charmed by spending millions on sports that are visible only 17 days every four years.

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With a bit of disdain, Ueberroth described seeing poker and violent bastardized martial arts being glorified as sports on the Internet and on cable television. He said traditional Olympic sports like fencing and volleyball can become much more popular but need exposure. Hence, the network.

It is possible the U.S.O.C. has already kneecapped Chicago. The very best that can be said about the new committee is that Ueberroth says it knows what it is doing. He certainly knew what he was doing in 1984, when he threw a magnificent party.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: For Chicago, The Game Within The Games. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe